


Midsummer Night's Breakdown

by pixcat



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Roommates, good luck to anybody else going back 2 school/uni rn, snuggly bees, yang is super depressed and blake is there for her!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2016-09-04
Packaged: 2018-08-12 22:27:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7951594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pixcat/pseuds/pixcat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yang isn't always the bundle of sunshine everyone expects, but as an older sister she's gotten good at hiding the moments she's not. Turns out Blake is quite familiar with both Yang and depression, and Yang lets her see her at her most vulnerable. Bees supporting bees <3 (College AU, Team RWBY shares a four-bedroom apartment)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midsummer Night's Breakdown

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you guys enjoy this! This is very self-indulgent, and I started writing this in the middle of a Depressive Time™ during finals week. Kind of a combo of that, and a character study, and actually trying to show how I think Yang would deal with a sort of mental illness experience I've experienced, that I also think Yang would experience (and that maybe she does, who knows). This is also the longest fic I've published, which is pretty neat-o.

All Yang wanted to do was curl up and let herself cry like she knew she needed to for a few hours. Follow that up by drifting into a deep, sunken sleep, waking up puffy and dazed, and she’d be ready to take on her week. 

It always seemed to happen on Sundays. And Mondays. And Tuesdays… 

She was just glad she had the apartment to herself. Ruby, Weiss, and Pyrrha had gone out, and Yang pretended not to know that Blake was over at Neptune and Sun’s place a mere two blocks over. Thankfully, she was also thinking about everything else swirling around in her life, so thoughts of Blake and her own dark social anxieties swiftly, temporarily, fluttered away. 

Rather than letting herself curl up just yet, Yang instead found herself in her bedroom, perched on the side of her bed. Her knee bounced up and down with such ferocity that she could feel the sharp wooden edge of the bedframe digging into the bottom of her foot. She sat like that, face buried in her hands as she tried to focus on her breathing, until she couldn’t deal with sitting down anymore. Energy of all kinds was coursing and chasing through her body, and she could feel her hair starting to singe at the tips. 

Simply staring at the punching bag she’d convinced their landlord to let her install made her feel better, so she stood up, sweeping her headphones off her bedside table and onto her head, and started blaring her loud, obnoxious EDM workout playlist through them. Weiss’ voice nagged at the back of her mind as she wrapped her knuckles, something about tinnitus she always screeched at her and Ruby. 

Squaring herself in front of the punching bag, she was glad to at least feel something stir in her numb haze. The sound of her first hit landing felt like it sent a punch through her own brain. She felt like she was waking up, being pulled out of whatever dissociative fog she had been in. She could feel herself rising up, but she could also feel herself falling down.

She sped up her hits from one tentative, thoughtful strike at a time, to any she could land to keep the bag swaying away from her. As she paced herself, she focused her energy on the muscles in her arms, feeling the energy flowing from her core through her shoulders through her arms. Each hit was deeper than the last. She could feel it in her knuckles, each hit a satisfying pressure reverberating backwards into her. 

Her shaking was starting to make each strike weaker, each one another fraction of a centimeter off. It took entirely missing the bag, swinging herself forward into it with the momentum of her punch, to notice she was crying and out of breath. Each sob choked air from her lungs like hitting a punching bag for a few minutes shouldn’t do. 

The more time passed, the more swings she tried to take, the further from her mark and shakier she got. Her once missed punch turned into several, until she found herself clinging to the bag.

Being forced to quit -- feeling like she was being forced to quit -- after mere minutes made her hate her situation, herself, everything, even more. It was another reminder of how insufficient she was, how incapable. She couldn’t control her own arms, how could she control anything else? 

She stumbled backward to her bed and laid down, curling onto her side and into herself. She pulled her blanket into a clump in front of her, hugging the soft warmth to her as she felt colder and colder. Tears were starting to leave a noticeable wet patch on the corner of her pillow, and she shifted it to a drier patch.

When she got to this point, she knew she could just sink into every ounce of physical, emotional, and mental discomfort she was feeling. She could feel it crawling and swirling beneath her skin, wishing she could just pry herself out of it, wishing there was any way she could make it stop. She’d always want to go back to her punching bag, but she felt too heavy to move, much less to keep swinging those fists that kept missing their marks. Just thinking about it made her feel worse, like more of a failure. Her shiny obsidian arm couldn’t bring her sense of stability back.

There was a quiet knock at the door and Blake’s quiet voice murmured after, “I have Gatorade.” 

Silence for a moment. Yang screwed her eyes tight, feeling the red creeping in but wishing that it wasn’t, doubting why it was. 

“Throw something at the door if I shouldn’t come in.” 

Yang thought for a moment, almost feeling herself reach toward the little corgi plushie Ruby had given her years ago. She heard Blake wait a moment before placing her hand on the door handle, followed by another hesitation, and a single, testing rattle of the well-worn door handle. Before the door opened, Yang tugged the comforter over herself.

From outside the door, Blake was having her own internal debate about what to do, so she gave Yang as much time with as many warning points as possible. She knew, probably more than Ruby or Weiss, that this happened to Yang. Yang didn’t seem to want Ruby to know, and Weiss probably thought she knew but really had no clue. Blake spent so much time at their apartment that she noticed when Yang would disappear, and when she would disappear for a bit longer than usual and make a little less noise -- none -- than usual. As soon as she started noticing the schedule to it, it hadn’t taken her much to piece it together.

Once she entered the room, Blake hovered at the foot of Yang’s bed. She could almost see Yang trembling from half beneath the covers. Blake walked around and set the blue energy drink on the cluttered bedside table. 

“Did anything trigger this?” Blake’s question was not presumptuous, something Yang appreciated. Blake knew as much as she did that sometimes shit just happened. 

Yang shook her head, or at least Blake assumed she did based on the motions beneath the blankets.

“So it goes,” Blake gave a small nod, mostly for herself. She shifted, unsure what to do, where she stood.

“Would it help if I stayed in here? I have my book, too, I could just… read... to myself.” Blake’s offer came without pressure, and Yang knew they were close enough where rejecting the offer wouldn’t bring any offense. Inside, she made a mental note that Blake’s social awareness and compassion really was a reliably positive thing in her life.

Nevertheless, it took Yang a moment to decide how to respond. 

It was the third time that Blake had seen her like this. The other two, she had been letting her anger out on the punching bag when it broke off its original and weak hinge and hit the wall and part of Yang’s closet. Blake had burst into the room to investigate the obscene crashing to see red creeping into Yang’s eyes and flames licking up the ends of her hair. She hadn’t seen any tears that time, instead sitting with Yang on the bed and talking it out and helping her wrap bandages around her hands. The second had been similar to what Blake was seeing then: Yang sitting with her knees tucked under her chin, eyes screwed up tight and tears seeping out of them. Yang had let her in to bring her a second glass of water and some of Ruby’s chocolate chip cookies, but had sent her out almost immediately after. She didn’t like people seeing her cry. 

This time, though, she was willing to admit she didn’t want to be alone. 

She didn’t want to be, and she was afraid of trusting herself alone with what was left of her wavering self-concept.

“Stay, please.” Yang’s voice cracked from beneath the blankets. 

Blake froze. This had never happened before -- with Yang or anyone else. Sure, she’d comforted friends before -- hell, she’d comforted Yang before -- but this was a whole new ball game she suddenly felt unprepared for. Dealing with an angry Yang was one thing, dealing with a quiet and shrinking Yang was another.

Sheets rustled as Yang pushed herself to a seated position, glancing at the floor next to Blake’s feet. She looked shrunken and defeated; eyes red in a different way; so unlike the image of herself she always broadcast to the world. The room felt cold. 

“Would you mind just uh, sitting next to me?” Yang’s still-hoarse voice asked. 

Blake nodded once from where she was hovering between the bed and the door. “Yeah,” she said. She moved to the other side of Yang’s bed, scooting inwards towards the middle, closer to Yang without crowding her. 

They’d known each other for two years before Team RWBY had started living together in a giant apartment, but hanging out in Yang’s room for the first time had been so strange. They both had felt walls go back up, somehow. A private room was a lot more intimate than their shared dorm freshman year, and it’d taken them a little while to adjust. After several months, they had adjusted, finding their new experimental stride. Blake wasn’t sure if she felt the walls returning, or their rubble disappearing.

Blake had spent enough time thinking about it to have figured it all out, not that she was even totally ready to admit that to herself. There had been enough time to process, enough of her usual queer media lurks scoured, that she was fairly certain Yang had also come to the same conclusion. Yet, the planets had yet to align, and flashes of doubt in her judgment would appear from time to time, and a bout of depression was certainly no time for heartfelt proclamations of love.

With a brief blanche of fear, she hoped nothing she’d been doing -- or not doing -- had made Yang’s situation worse. 

Muted sniffles drifted to Blake’s ears from her partner’s little nest beneath the blankets, pulling her out of her self-centered fretting and back to the reason she was sitting where she was. None of the current situation meshed well with the concept of Yang, or, Blake realized, the concept of Yang most were familiar with. People tended to see her as electric, not grounding.

There was a moment of near-silence as Blake shifted into the cushion of the bed and the pillows behind her. She took a moment to look around the room to reacquaint herself with the familiar baubles, wishing its familiarity was as calming to Yang as it always was to her but understanding why it wouldn’t be. Why, if anything, it may be the opposite. 

From her safety beneath the covers, Yang could tell what Blake was doing, because it was what she did every time she came into her room. Normally, Blake would be standing and blinking around the room for a moment before fully committing to actually going inside. Yang never took offense, Blake did that when she entered any room, but every time she came into Yang’s it was obviously much calmer than others. She was absorbing, not scanning. 

Yang usually couldn’t deal with the quiet. When she got that sort of bad, she’d try to play something in the background, or through her headphones. But most of the time, like that day, she couldn’t deal with it. Nothing sounded good, nothing felt good. She always reminded herself of Barbosa’s cursed pirates from Pirates of the Caribbean. 

When she couldn’t play her music, the silence was unsettling. There was nothing there to pull her out of her own head, but she couldn’t do anything about it. There was no winning.

That’s why it was so striking that Blake, the very beacon of quietness, was so calming no matter what was going on. It was like Blake absorbed any of the hostility of quiet, taking the edge off and instead turning it into a soft and cool blanket. Or, at the very least, making it tolerable. She made the quiet normal. 

Once Blake finished her peaceful adjustment into the room, she shifted her book in her lap, fuddling with it for a moment before cracking it open and flitting hesitant fingers to her ribbon bookmark. She spent a lot of her time in Yang’s room reading something or another, books and study materials providing a bit of an escape from whatever the new vibes they both had. When they studied together, Yang would sprawl on her bed while Blake placed her things around the (comfortable) clutter on Yang’s desk. 

But this time, they were not studying, and Blake didn’t really know what to do with herself. Yang had asked her to sit with her, so sit she did, and she began to continue her book from where she’d left off earlier, after she’d gotten back to the apartment and just before she’d noticed Yang’s predicament. 

As soon as the familiar sounds of Blake with a book settled into her ears, any tension Yang felt about having someone else in her room, witnessing her in her vulnerable and awful state, started to dissipate. She felt just as bad as she did before, heavy and anchored to her bed as the tears ran down her face, spilling out of scrunched up eyes and creating a very damp spot beneath her on the sheets. Yang was just grateful she no longer felt the threat of feeling like the only person on the planet, suffocating in isolation like she otherwise would be. 

Yang started to listen to the sounds of her room, something she otherwise never would have done. Usually her world folded in on itself and all she could think about was the pounding in her head, but instead, she could hear the sound of Blake turning a page every couple minutes. The hiss of her skin over the pages, the sound of the turned page settling into the others, the subtle shift of Blake’s hands on the book and in her lap. 

Blake barely moved, only ever occasionally shifting her leg or her hip a bit where she sat, letting gravity nestle her further into the cushion of the mattress and the thick comforter she’d never known Yang to use before that day. 

Dozens of pages must have flipped by before Yang herself felt the need to move, pulling herself upward and throwing her legs over the side of the bed, not even wincing as her ankle hit the mattress frame. She leaned on her left arm, hand digging into the mattress, and ran the fingers of her free hand through her tangling cascade of hair. She faced the wall, trying to keep her eyes tuned anywhere so Blake couldn’t see them.

The movement was sudden and unexpected once Blake had become absorbed in her book. Her eyes had flicked over to follow the motion, and soon her chin angled after it. Her eyes locked on the bouncing curls and the glinting black metal fingers that ran through them, suddenly the brightest thing in the otherwise overcast room. 

She didn’t have anything she wanted to say, she didn’t know what Yang would’ve wanted or needed to hear, so she opted not to say anything, allowing Yang the room to do or say whatever she needed to do. 

There was a long enough pause, Yang perched on the side of the bed with one arm propping her up and the other now resting in her lap, that Blake felt as though her staring was intrusive. Her eyes flitted back to her book, though her ears remained trained on her now-less-sobby partner. 

“I’m gonna go sit on the couch.” Yang’s voice was stuffy and rough on the edges -- yet another thing Blake wasn’t used to. She wondered if Ruby had ever heard her sister like that, with a voice raw from so many tears and so much sniffling. She doubted it, considering that would’ve been the last thing Yang would’ve wanted Ruby to witness. 

Blake’s motions as she slipped her bookmark into her page and closed the book were languid, one ending and the other following without a moment’s clip or jostle in between. Moments later, she was standing up to allow Yang to drag the entire full-sized comforter off the bed and out into the couch in the living room, plopping onto it and facing the big flat-screen TV. Blake noted that the gray-painted walls of the living room didn’t help to brighten the mood in the air, but let Yang go where she needed to. At least she wasn’t stuck in the miasma clouding up her bedroom anymore. 

Blake trailed behind Yang, fingers lingering on a lamp’s switch and eyes lingering on Yang’s for a nodded approval. The warm yellow light bounced around in Yang’s curls before they cascaded into the rest of the room. 

Her reading light -- and Yang illumination light -- now on, Blake walked around the small side-table and went to sit on the end of the couch opposite where Yang and her waterfall of a comforter sat. It was impossible not to notice how puffy and red Yang’s face was. It didn’t mean much to her, beyond a reminder that Yang was every bit a human being as she was no matter what her superhuman personality lead one to believe. But still, she knew it was a big step for Yang.

 

But before she even made it around the table, Yang had mostly shifted her way to the other side of the couch, near Blake, stretching her legs across the cushions. Her puffy eyes looked up at Blake, who stood frozen mid-step, eyebrows raised and book hanging in her hand. 

Some things were hovering in the air that, maybe neither of them had totally expected to confront in that specific context. Instead of saying anything, Yang just sniffled, leaned forward to open a space between her back and the couch. She reached, somewhat awkwardly, behind herself to pat the cushion.

She ran her fingers along the softness of the blanket as she waited for Blake to do something -- anything, really. She had taken her dive, and was waiting embrace of the water below, whether it be a cold ocean or a welcoming pool. 

From her vantage next to the couch, the gears in Blake’s head were churning like those of a train. They’d spent countless hours, weeks, months together -- countable years, but several of them nonetheless. How many times had Yang laid with her head and sea of golden hair in Blake’s lap while she read and Yang flicked her way through social media? How many times had they leaned into each other on the couch watching competitive baking? How many times had they awkwardly glanced at each other and not said anything?

Everything was so personal, so far on a new level, that day, that it just felt different. 

But if Yang wanted some physical comfort, so be it, Blake thought. It didn’t have to be different. Making it weird would only make it weird. Yang was already, clearly, uncomfortable enough, and letting her lay on her lap was the least Blake could do to shoulder any she could of whatever it was Yang was grappling with. She knew if their positions were reversed, Yang would’ve brought her the moon.

So, Blake wedged herself into the corner of the couch, tucking her knees onto the seat and turning toward Yang. With some careful wiggling, she shoved a pillow beneath her right elbow just in time for Yang to recline onto her. 

Her skin was as warm as it always was, a comforting sign that Yang was no less losing her livelihood than Blake ever did in her… comparable situations. She was all there, just feeling a bit more down than people really deserve to be. Yang was such a force of nature, but Blake had long since started to cherish all the things she did that proved they really had more in common than they initially had thought, all those years ago.

Blake wrapped her lower arm around Yang gently, then propped her book against Yang’s shoulder with her other. She barely got through the page when Yang spoke, the fingers that had stilled started working against the blanket again. 

“Hey so, uh,” she began, “I know you know this happens.” 

She paused. 

To others it would’ve seemed like Yang was waiting for a response, but Yang understood that Blake probably just wouldn’t have much to say just yet. 

“And thank you, for not pushing for it. For letting me do my thing, however I had to do it. For not just going to Ruby or, ugh, god, Weiss.” The fingers stilled, a palm laying flat along a blanket-shielded kneecap. “You’re just really comforting, Blake. The way you do that, just sit there and not freak out about all this stuff.” 

This brought a smile to Blake’s face, thawing her worries while Yang’s body heat thawed her far-too-air-conditioned body. She took a chance and set the book down on the side table, returning her hand to Yang’s forearm and letting it rest there. She wanted to run her hands along the soft skin, but resisted, questioning the action’s propriety. 

“It’s not fair to take freedom away from people, whether that’s civil liberties or something as individual as self-care.” 

Yang turned onto her other side so she was facing the television and not the back of the couch. She gave Blake’s knee a single tap of her palm before resting her hand there. 

“If it’s okay, I kind of want to let my brain rot with the rest of me while I watch TV.” Normally Yang’s rare self-depreciating humor would be accompanied by a glimmering smirk and a quirked up eyebrow, but today Yang merely rested her head on Blake’s stomach, curling into the couch, herself, and hesitantly into Blake. 

Having lifted her hand from Yang’s arm as the other girl shifted, Blake realized she should probably lower it from its awkwardly angled position in the air. She let it come to rest on Yang’s other bicep - the one partially soft and partially metal, but warm and strong nonetheless. She stared longingly at the book in her left hand as Yang started flicking through her profile on the apartment’s shared Netflix queue. 

She must’ve sighed or something, as Yang’s tired voice mumbled around her cheek, smooshing into Blake’s stomach, “You can still read if you want to.” As comfortable as she was getting, and as disconnected as she felt, she didn’t want Blake to waste her day away for her. The thought of being that sort of burden didn’t sit well with her, making her start to feel worse for a moment before realizing she could just check in with her partner -- just like any other day.

“Thanks, Yang.” 

But, Blake found herself content to sit there, hand resting on Yang’s shoulder, wishing her fingers were trailing through the blonde main spilling towards her. The sound of programs being interrupted with each channel hop until Yang came to rest on Yang’s favorite cartoon channel provided a sort of lulling rhythm. As she felt her own eyelids begin to feel heavier, her breathing slow, and her heartbeat calm. She knew that it wasn’t a realistic expectation, but hoped Yang was feeling any comparable sort of peace anyway. 

Sleepy as Yang’s body heat and blanket was making her, she had two weeks before classes started and had a constantly-growing book list that she was itching to get to after rereading Ninjas of Love yet again. She stared at the back of Yang’s glowing yellow head in a moment of contemplation before opening her book and resting it -- testingly at first -- against the back of her partner’s skull, inching her other hand up Yang’s bicep to hold the corner open. 

Yang barely moved in response. Blake thought she had fallen asleep until the girl’s wrist twisted, and she stuck her metal thumb up for a moment. Blake’s ears twitched amusedly and she reached her arm forward and gently pressed the thumb back down, giving the hand a brief squeeze with the moment of fleeting bravery she felt, before returning her hand to Yang’s shoulder and the corner of her book. 

From her nest of Blake’s legs, Yang still felt like she was sinking, but now she felt like she was sinking into a bit of a brightly-lit, slightly cushioned dungeon instead of a dark and cold pit of despair and nothing else. Any sense of prickly newness of showing Blake this side of her had long gone, absorbing into the comforting shade that was Blake. She felt like she was floating in a sensory deprivation pod, but in a good way, so that she could feel whatever she needed to in the comforting embrace of her best friend.

Only a few of Blake’s pages folded by before Blake could no longer resist the pull of gravity on her eyelids. She slumped against the back of the couch, one hand barely propping her book up as she slid at a barely-noticeable speed until she was laying with her chin resting against Yang’s shoulder. Yang could feel Blake sliding, putting her languid and cuddly motions together with the lack of page-turning happening, and smiled to herself. Blake only ever fell asleep around her. 

They stayed like that, Yang working her way through whatever cartoons flashed across the screen, thinking about physical manifestation of Blake’s support almost as much as whatever she had been thinking about before. It was comforting, to her, to have a reminder (a reminder curled up around her nonetheless) that she wasn’t actually alone, that she never had been. Blake had also, over the years, turned into someone she felt would be a reminder she would never, in the future tense, be alone, either. She was inspiration to stay strong and move forward, and their past was a reminder to not do so with unhealthy habits or force. 

Unlike Blake, Yang couldn’t help but reach her left hand up to where Blake’s had come to rest on her shoulder, pulling it down into hers slowly, so as not to wake Blake. She gave it a small squeeze, entwining their fingers, and went back to watching her cartoons.


End file.
